At Sea in the Middle of Ithilien
by UnnamedElement
Summary: Legolas' Sea-longing through the eys of his lover, long after it started. This is the story of all the ways it pulls them apart and brings them together, at sea in the middle of Ithilien. /Post-war, Mirkwood Series- Legolas, Ithildim & Co./ Part 1.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's note and warning:** I've been fascinated by the Sea-longing for almost as long as I've been reading Tolkien, which is just shy of two decades. This story is the ups and downs and ins and outs of the Sealonging from the perspective of someone who loves Legolas, an OC (Ithildim), and it is more poetic than plot-driven; it will heavily feature Gimli. Several stories—finished and unfinished—are referenced in this: Enough, several vignettes in Midden, Idiot Swallows & Impatient Dwarves, Where You Go I Will Go, and two poems. My OCs Ithildim and Saida can be found in any Mirkwood Series fic, pre- or post-Fellowship. (But you don't need to have read those to read this.) If you're a fan of Ithildim and my Mirkwood Series but don't want to read about Legolas in a relationship, then skip this one and stick with the others. I don't want to hear complaints about slash, though—I hear that enough in my real life.

Thank you for indulging my desire to work on my characters, spend some time away from the heaviness of other things, and to satisfy the story-related whims of adult ADHD.

* * *

 **Chapter One**

* * *

 **Ithilien, Fourth Age 30**

I have been in love with Legolas for a long time. I did not know it for centuries—though not as long as he denied it—not until after we had already served as captains together for too long to turn away from our duties. I have loved others—though not been in love with them—and I have seen others here and there, and Legolas knows this. He has seen no one else—his interest in romance is stunted, and he has a lot of growing yet to do—but he is constantly falling in and out of love with me.

I do not mind that anymore, because he always circles back, as he does in all things. Not many know it, but there is a steadiness to his caprice, and a predictability.

I am good for him. He needs an anchor, and I sometimes need a catalyst.

It seems Gimli and I serve much the same purpose, these days.

Legolas spends much time with him, and if I did not feel badly for how soon Gimli will have to leave this world I might resent him that, but I do feel badly for him—and he keeps Legolas more whole in the moments he is with me, besides—so I do not resent him at all. Saida tells me that the first time the Sea-longing took Legolas badly in Ithilien—several years since I had last seen him, at that point—that Gimli is who brought him back to us. Alfirinion—Saida's nephew—kept him here, but Gimli... He brought him back.

Legolas does love children. I knew Legolas when he was an older brother but, for longer years, I have know him as the youngest. Losing his sister changed him, and I think that is why he is so good with children. They slow him down so that the world moves more slowly, and he can look around and see what is about without spinning off. Do not get me wrong—Legolas can be patient and measured, but when he has no need to be... He is anything but.

Not being able to give Legolas children is my only regret, and it is the only thing he, too, cannot give me—everything else in this love we work around, but that is an emptiness, I think.

I joked once that he should marry Saida if she would be willing to give him children. I remember how he laughed and laughed; head thrown back, it rocked his hips until he fell flat on his back and I lost him in the stars. When I crawled on top of him, I saw them reflected in the dark grey of his eyes, and then he focused and smiled again, took my head between his hands and whispered: "Never." He rolled me over and made me look at the stars instead, and he proceeded to show me all the ways he could never _ever_ be with Saida.

She is too much a sister to either of us, besides. And she has taken care of Legolas too much to be his lover.

But Legolas is not well, right now. His thoughts are away more often than not, and he has signed over governance of Ithilien temporarily. He is a memory of himself—or he is himself most embodied? I have not quite yet figured out what the Sea does to him.

We do not make love when he is like this, even when he wants it, because—to me—it is like he is not here.

It burns my heart.

...I asked Aragorn, once, what Legolas was like when he first heard the gulls, but Aragorn was not there with him, and so he does not know. I asked Gimli, too, but that is a sore subject, it seems, for Legolas did not tell Gimli about the Sea for months, and so Gimli felt he had left Legolas all that time unprotected. Finally, I asked Legolas what it was like—I asked him how it might have looked to other people so that I would know, but he told me he did not know, because he was not _other people._

I could have smacked him for that cheek (and I did, in fact, cuff him).

Once, Legolas left—as he will sometimes do—and we could not find him, at all. He showed back up—a month later!—with Gimli. He had traveled to the Glittering Caves and then ridden back. He could not remember a quarter of his journey— _because it was all colors, Ithildim!_ —and his arm was broken. He stayed with Saida for a week, then, because I could not look at him without wanting to scream, and Legolas is not well-affected by yelling. He will simply stare at you, until you are left breathless, and then he bursts into laughter. If he were not so kind I would sometimes think him soulless, the way he sometimes laughs, so unexpectedly, and inappropriately.

But he is kind, nevertheless, and I love him.

Still, I am at a loss now.

It is quiet in this house when he disappears.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's note:** 1) Alfirinion and Ewessel are Saida's nephew and niece who were effectively orphaned during the Battle Under the Trees. They grew up mostly under Saida and Legolas. Saida is one of Legolas and Ithildim's agemates and best friends. 2) Elboron is Faramir and Eowyn's child. Elboron maybe has a son, Barahir, at some point, but it is unclear and, besides, this child is not that one, anyway. 3) Sponsors are basically godparents in certain traditions—I have no idea about Gondorian child-rearing. I have made this up. 4) I hope character dynamics become clear—there's a lot of backstory that is still out back, yet.

Thanks for reading!

* * *

 **Chapter Two**

* * *

Alfirinion came running into the house this morning—just half an hour ago—at full speed, almost catching himself up in the sitting room curtains as he barrelled into the kitchen. (Legolas leaves the doors open at night in the summer to let in the breeze, for it is so hot here, compared to Mirkwood, and it took me a long time to adjust. The air can be heavy between seasons, like right before a storm.) Faramir's guard had sent word that Legolas was spotted headed back to the forest from the coast, but Alfirinion took up the message and beat them here.

However, it turned out that Faramir's guard consisted only of Elboron, and he stumbled into the kitchen with his heavy Man-feet a full eight minutes after Alfirinion arrived with the announcement.

Elboron is all grown now, though still young. He was such friends with Ewessel as a child, and then with Alfirinion as he grew, but now he is older than them both, though Alfirinion is almost an adult himself.

It is a strange thing, the way mortals age.

Elboron also sent a loaf of bread from his mother, who ages, too—Legolas jokes with her that she is now the " _Whiter_ Lady of Rohan" as her pale hair lightens with the years; she says it is the stress of raising Elboron that bleached her prematurely, for the rest of her looks hale as ever. She sends her love, and Faramir has sent notes from Minas Tirith. (We are farther out than they, and it can take a while for things to get here, wandering elves included.)

I have finally settled Alfirinion down with a cup of tea and a task—reviewing trade reports that I do not want to do—and Elboron chatters now about his life, one thing after another. It is "Father _this_ " and "Eldarion _that_ " and "Last week, Ithildim, you would not believe what Lord Fionor proposed in court!" (though I _quite_ imagine I could). But then, out of nowhere, he announces that he will be _married!_

I at first do not say a word, but stare instead. I feel the air parch my tongue and watch Alfirinion nearly drop his mug halfway to his mouth. He catches it with his other hand and curses as tea splashes on Legolas' neat reports.

These are the moments in which Legolas is incredibly talented—he would not miss a beat; he would know what to say. However queer he is with mortals, he _understands_ them.

I, on the other hand, do not. And I _also_ do not know what to say. And I _furthermore_ do not even know this woman he intends to marry!

I swallow and begin to say something— _anything—_ but Alfirinion recovers first. He has patted down the reports with his sleeve and drained his cup, and he is looking at Elboron with his head cocked to the side in an eerie imitation of Legolas (though it is not an imitation, anymore, I think, so much as who he has actually become).

"Are you having a _child_ , Elboron?" Alfirinion asks directly, and I nearly choke.

Elboron's cheeks burn. I can feel my own warm, as well, for it is a dreadful question.

But Elboron only cocks his own head and crosses his arms before leaning back in his chair and answering with a challenge and a small smile: " _Yes_."

I stand up from the table and walk to the sitting room doors, praying for Legolas to drop out of the tree and save me from this suddenly uncomfortable situation.

"Yes!" Elboron repeats, and I can feel the boys' dual excitement grow behind me.

There is a rustle several trees away, and I pull back the curtains and wait for Legolas' entrance—whether it is quiet or a whirlwind will tell me a lot...

"And _part_ of why I came," Elboron is saying behind me, though I am hardly paying attention, "is to invite you to our wedding."

Alfirinion is fully giddy now.

" _And_ ," Elboron continues.

Legolas has slid out of the holm-oak nearest the doors and he brushes catkins out of his face—they stick in his hair, which is knotted tightly at the base of his neck.

He smiles when he sees me and I smile back, and I have forgotten Elboron is even making an announcement behind us. In Legolas' eyes I can see he is inside himself, and so I take him up in my arms and swing him around once before kissing him fully—

He tastes like the sea, but he has come back. He always does.

"The other part," Elboron starts up again, but he is investigating the commotion now and trails off momentarily. He stands directly in front of us and Legolas leans into my shoulder as he waits for Elboron's next words, nearly lounging as if he has been here all along. "The _other_ part," he begins again, "is to ask these two fools to be my child's sponsors."

I am at a loss for words, for, honestly, I do not know exactly what he means by that...

Nonetheless, Legolas obviously does, and he is not at a loss for words at _all_ , as he seldom is. He has yelled "Yes!" before I can tell him I have _no_ idea what Elboron is talking about.

And then he turns to me and quickly translates—his cheeks are ruddy, and he glows.

Alfirinion bursts into laughter as I nod my understanding and am pulled dumbly into the room. I find myself smiling as I think how we must look to Alfirinion and Elboron:

Legolas is a mess—his skin is darker with mud than usual, his thin cotton shirt is ripped up the side, and an oak flower dangles between his eyes until he jerks his head to the side to dislodge it—he quivers with flickering energy. In comparison, I am neat and tidy, and I stand with my legs shoulder-width apart, one arm caught up in Legolas' strong grasp and the other rubbing at the back of my neck.

I see it all as if in slow motion, and—finally—I see myself react.

"Yes," I finally say; I drop my hand from my neck and pat Legolas' arm as I respond. "Of _course_ , Elboron. We would be honored."

For we are, I am.

And then Legolas laughs and squeezes Elboron's shoulder: "Though I _am_ surprised you ask after the mess we made of your childhood!"

" _We_ made?!" I exclaim, and I am immediately caught up in his mood. "I hardly—"

But then Alfirinion is hugging Legolas and thumping Elboron on the back in that bizarrely mannish way, and Legolas has his hands on either side of my face and is explaining what precisely it means to be a Gondorian child's sponsor and how flattered we should be, and he is _so_ happy, and it makes my heart sing.

I tug at his arm and he whirs into motion beside me.

Still, as he trails me to the counter and hovers as I make him a cup of tea, as he hums while I check beneath his shirt for injuries he has failed to mention, I can feel the crusty salt of the Sea's kiss on his clothes—the dust of it on his skin—and when I look up again and swallow—say his name and press the warm tea into his cool hands—his pupils have gone small. Though he is watching Elboron and Alfirinion laugh and joke as if he is thinking or dreaming, I do not think that is what he does at all.

It has been barely ten minutes, and he is already back at the shore.

I am here in Ithilien—in this house that we built together, from the ashes—and he is already gone.

I pinch his pinky finger as I wrap his hand around the mug, and then pull the tie out of his hair and shake it out while I wait for him to come back to me.

The boys have not noticed.

And then he is here, and he whispers a thousand apologies. He has sat cross-legged on the floor at my feet and downs his tea, as if that obeisance will mend his absence.

I settle behind him with my legs in a _V_ and work the knots out of his hair, as we have done for centuries. The outside of his hips press into the inside of my thighs as he tries to lean back into me after a minute, but his hair is still a mess, and there is not room.

We listen to Elboron and Alfirinion make plans for Elboron's future.

Finally, he shakes my hands off and plates his hair himself. When he is done, I put an arm around him and pull him close and wait for Elboron to leave.

Still, we do not speak.


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's note:** I have taken some liberties with Southern Gondor's climate and vegetation. I am most familiar with the Appalachian Mountains of the United States. Soursop are related to pawpaws, and _can_ grow in the Mediterranean, and ramson is a European name for what we call ramps in Appalachia (and what others sometimes call wild leeks). Here's an interesting etymological note from a West Virginia scholar: " _The name ramps (usually plural) is one of the many dialectical variants of the English word ramson, a common name of the European bear leek (Allium ursinum), a broad-leaved species of garlic much cultivated and eaten in salads, a plant related to our American species. The Anglo-Saxon ancestor of ramson was hramsa, and ramson was the Old English plural, the –n being retained as in oxen, children, etc. The word is cognate with rams, in German, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, and with the Greek kromuon, garlic [...]. Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1904) lists as variants rame, ramp, ramps, rams, ramsden, ramsey, ramsh, ramsies, ramsy, rommy, and roms, mostly from northern England and Scotland."_

The attack on the Ithilien elves' mentioned in this chapter takes place in the unfinished story "A Small & Passing Thing." Ithildim's comment about Legolas' mother refers to events in "Enough."

* * *

It has been three days since Legolas returned from the sea, and he is elbow deep in flour at the counter. The sun is only a quarter of the way up the sky—barely breaching the top of the trees—and all Legolas' paperwork is spread out on the kitchen table in front of me.

When I first woke, Legolas was already gone—which is hardly unusual—so I tidied, and then set up my work in the study and slipped into a dazed concentration. Legolas called for me, though, sometime after he had returned—silently—from his dawn-wandering, and when I peered around the corner into the kitchen I found him steaming oats and lazily drizzling honey into a large pot of freshly-brewed mint tea. He smiled at me so sweetly—so vulnerably—when he looked up from his work that I immediately forgot all I had just laid out—organized from most important to least important, and in chronological stacks—just one room away. He then scooped a bowl of oats for me and then for himself, poured us both cups of tea, and laid it all out on the table with spoons. He stared at me for a moment without moving, then crossed the room and pressed a heavy kiss to my cheek—he guided me to the table with a firm grip on my arm. When we got there, he pulled out a chair for me with an air of unintentional chivalry, and then settled in very close beside me in his own chair-he then set to his meal without a word but with single-minded purpose.

Yesteday, Legolas came back into himself with startling force, and he has been painfully attentive to me sense, as if he cannot turn off his affection.

I do not think he knows what he is doing, but I have known him for a long time, and when he is like this, it means he worries—he busies himself with others when he cannot bare to think on himself. He is compassionate to a true fault, and he has been like this forever—I blame it on his mother.

After breakfast, he pinned back the curtains and cleaned away the dishes and then left without a word through the sitting room doors, a basket hanging from his arm.

I am used to him disappearing in the spring and summer at unusual times, for fruits—he learned to bake from my mother once, when he was the most injured I have ever seen him, and he has been doing it ever since. I can tell how much he is thinking by how much he is baking, and I am fairly certain they are directly related...

Anyway, he came back less than an hour after he left with a basket of slightly premature soursop, just-red strawberries, and large bunches of ramson and fiddlehead ferns. He chattered about his walk and the sparrows' games as he unpacked and then tried—once again!—to apologize for his most recent flightiness (I did not let him finish, for we have been through this too many times), and then began plundering his baking cupboard.

So, now, we are here: Him—wild hair like a golden halo about his face, eyes downcast as he works dough for his flatbread, powerfully, (though we are less at war now, he is no less strong, and sometimes that strength startles me when I remember it, rippling beneath the layers of his typical laughter and gaity, his cheek and quiet contemplation), stood, half-leaning, at the counter to my right; and me—hands unfamiliar with daily clutching a quill, sorting through Legolas' half color-coded system, crossing out and revising and rewriting documents, the ones he has neglected longest first, and then the easiest, and then the ones that matter least; I am bent over a table half-cut with half-morning light.

To be honest, I am thinking about writing Gimli. Saida is usually the one to do that, but Legolas is now my responsibility (as I am his), and she has deferred—after all these years—to me. I find it makes me more nervous to do, though, than it ever did she...

I look up from clearing the first of four stacks of paper. (Legolas and I have extraordinarily different ideas of order these days—there was not _one_ of his color-coded notes that corresponded at all with my first pile!) He is humming to himself and his lips are slightly parted as he works: he has moved on to gently painting oil onto the flatbread as an artist primes her canvas—he is enchanting to watch, and I do not know how I could ever not have fallen in love with him.

I lay down my pen as I think, and he glances up at me abruptly, and stares.

"Well," he suddenly says, "What are _you_ thinking?"

I nearly startle with his bluntness, because he is usually a bit slow his first day back inside himself, as if everything he says is a few minutes behind what he sees in the world.

But I will not lie to him—I never have.

" _You_ , you idiot," I say with a false stern voice. "Who else?"

And he bursts into laughter.

He crosses the small space between us and has playfully batted my nose with the oil brush before I can even blink.

"I know you do not think I think of anything, when I am away at the Sea," he says with alacrity, and I am once again taken aback, because he is so incredibly _here_ , and he is saying those _things_ that he sometimes says, that make you question all you know about Silvan elves and foresight.

He has laid down the brush by reaching blindly to the counter behind him, and he is dropping into a crouch in front of me. He turns my body toward him by tugging at my chair and yanking gently at my shoulder until I am facing him, and he takes both my hands in his, and digs his fingers into them, massaging the palms.

I try not to let my face show how cutting and accurate his last statement is.

"I _know_ you do not think I know anything," he repeats again, "but there are moments of clarity, and in them I always see you, foremost, and Gimli, and it is my love for you, Ithildim—even when I am blinded by the spray or deaf with the sea in my ears—that guides me back, like stars above the canopy, or the scent off the river, that roaring leads us home."

I had been looking at his face and his open, imploring eyes at the beginning, but at the last sentence I drop them, and watch his fingers work at my palms—they were cramping from the pen and I had not even noticed.

But _he_ had. When he is here, he always—inexplicably—knows.

"I do not forget you," Legolas says again, and he dips his head so I must look him in the face, for his errant hair tickles my nose, and he smells strongly of fresh ramson—I do not understand his intense love for it. "I do not forget you, Ithildim, _ever._ I swear," he says, "I never have."

His eyebrows tip in toward each other and the barely-there scar from that attack upon Ithilien all those years ago puckers at his temple—his nostrils flare as he takes another breath as if to implore again in my silence, but I will not hear another explanation; I do not need it... I know he tells the truth—I _know_ it—even as his absences burn my heart and leave me, his anchor, sometimes reeling.

I shake my hands out of his busy fingers and press one of them to his lips; I cup the other about his cheek—I can feel his lips thin as he smiles beneath my hand.

"I know, Legolas," I say quietly. "I know."

I drop my hand from his lips and pull him up so he is not crouching anymore; we both stand, and I kiss him softly, and his hands drift up so they are on my jaw, behind my head, one at my waist and slipping under my tunic; mine go from cheeks to waist, from biceps to slip under his shirt and slide up the bare skin of his chest, and the kiss is not soft anymore, but he suddenly shrieks in laughter as I accidentally graze his ribs, and then he is gone, dancing away.

He leaves me breathless as he stands at his station and runs his hands over his shirt and then down his thighs to straighten his trousers—it is a habit of his that today also serves a purpose.

"I have _baking_ to do, Ithildim," he says, with a mischievous smile, as if reprimanding, "or we will not have lunch, and _you_ promised Saida we would come over to her today to prove to her and Ewessel that I am back and fully sane."

I roll my eyes as he pulls down the fennel that hangs in a row of herbs from the ceiling.

"And then Eowyn is coming tomorrow, of course," he continues, and he is drifting off as he rambles. "She is determined, Ithildim, to teach me at least basic Rohirric—as payment for helping Elboron with Sindarin all those years—before..." but he trails off, and I watch carefully as something twitches at the corners of his eyes, and his jaw minutely clenches. He starts up again: "Before," he says, blinking and flaring his nostrils; the words come out in an unintentionally rushed breath, "Before she is too busy being a grandmother, and I am too busy being a sponsor, and you and I are back to running Ithilien, together."

It is an empty save. I know what he was thinking—that Eowyn wishes to teach him Rohirric before she is too old and before she eventually dies, before the only one left to carry on the language of her people in Gondor is her son.

Legolas is so entwined—he grows so quickly wherever he plants himself, and then he is stuck.

But I let it go. Instead, all I say is: "Of course, Legolas. We have much to do."

He looks up from picking fennel seeds from their dusty flowers, from dropping them one at a time on the flatbread. A poof of hair falls suddenly from behind his ear to sweep in a tangled curl across his face—he blows it away from his eyes with a puff, and then scratches some invisible itch by lifting his shoulder and rubbing it the length of his jaw—

Today, he seems so _normal_.

He has looked back to his work, and so I look back to mine.

I will wait to send for Gimli. We will go to lunch; I will talk to Saida; and I will wait. At least until tomorrow.

The sun is warm on my cheeks now, and Legolas is humming.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's note:** This is where I'm at with work this month, and it is bleeding over into my extracurriculars: 1) "I feel thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread" (Bilbo in _Fellowship of the Ring_ ), and 2) What you describe is common enough in warriors, and those who have labored long and hard but feel they have not reaped—those of us who have been dipped into like wells in a time of drought, until we come up dry as bone, with nothing left for ourselves (my Legolas, in "Midden").

So here's two chapters tonight, with a bit of a different tone, because I can't be bothered to edit for tone tonight and wanted to post! Chapter Six will switch to Legolas' point of view.

* * *

Lunch at Saida's went well, until it did not. Legolas was pleased to seeher, and her to see him, and Ewessel is still young, so sheimmediately rushed to Legolas' side and sat thigh-to-thigh with him almost the entire time we were there. She is the most fervent connoisseur of Legolas' baking, and she is not above wheedling to get a few treats more, and he is rather susceptible to it, too.

At the end of our visit, however, I asked Ewessel to go to Linden's for two cans of tomatoes and to pick up one piece of firewood from the supply barn, estimating that would take her a good half hour to complete.

And then we cleared the table, and Saida offered us both a splash of mead, and we settled in for what I thought might be an uncomfortable conversation.

When Legolas is well, he is truly the best assessor of his emotional well-being; he is honest and astute and sharply critical. When he is not well—or, rather, muddled by the sea, and all those things he carries around—he is truly a barrier to himself, and he overestimates his abilities and downplays his needs. When he is somewhere in between these two contrasts, he is still reasonable, but he is still rather far down the spectrum today, and I should have known—should have thought—and waited just one more day, even if he pushed, as I had planned.

Legolas had pulled his legs up beneath him in a sitting room chair. Saida set on the floor to his right—legs crossed at the ankles and leaning against a large chest of drawers, she played with a loose string on her tunic. I sat directly across from Legolas in a second chair, legs crossed at the knees, appreciatively winding about in small-talk before Legolas was bound to notice my silence and demand an explanation...

There is much love between the three of us, the kind of love that comes with years of trusting one another with each others' lives. The kind that is resilient enough to remain—eventually—unfazed by arguments and unkind words, extended and intentional silence, and even physical altercations. When Saida quit the army, she would not speak to us—nor could she even look at Legolas—for a full moon cycle. It was heartbreaking, but when she came back she was more Saida than we had known in long centuries. We are better for Saida not being a warrior. And we are often better when we fight—as close friends are apt to do—than we would have been had we never fought at all. I think there is a healing in that.

Anyway, Legolas ended up bringing up the sea himself in a moment of silence. Saida had been staring out the open window, undoubtedly searching for Ewessel's return, and I was waiting, on the edge of a precipice. He spun his mead—which he had not drank at all—in nervous circles before rocking to unstick his legs from beneath them and stretching them out fully, toes pointed toward the ceiling as he straightened then out and rolled his ankles.

"Ithildim wants to send for Gimli," he said suddenly, turning his head to where Saida sat on the floor. She looked from the window to him in mild surprise, and took a moment to finish her mead and sit down her mug before replying.

But Legolas cut in before she could: "That is why he asked Ewessel to fetch those things, so we would have time to talk."

He looked straight at me then, and cocked his head. "Is it not, Ithildim?"

"Yes," I said simply. There is no point in lying.

"Well, Legolas," Saida had said. "What do you think?"

And then Legolas had gone off, in that way that he does—not irrational, and not angry, but passionate and occasionally cutting. He leveled some words very directly at me about trust, and I leveled a few back about actions outweighing faith. He became very quiet and then stood and declared he would just go to Gondor, then, and have Aragorn call for Gimli and save us the missive, and that he was not saying that vindictively at all, by the way, just telling the truth.

And that is the frustrating thing about Legolas. He does not do things often out of spite, and so his outburst was heartfelt and earnest.

He threw up his hands and left, upset, nonetheless.

Saida and I fell into silence, staring at the door he had just passed through like a swirling zephyr—ephemeral and then even more gone. I fell heavily into myself, and deep, and I crossed my arms in a way I know is unbecoming, and waited for Saida to offer advice.

Five minutes after Legolas left, however, and she had still not offered any.

And now we sit here, and I have dropped my head into my hands, and am breathing deeply through my fingers as I watch my breath vibrate the frayed edges of my tunic.

I hear Saida sit up from her place on the ground and scoot closer to me, and I sigh, and clench my fists against my eyes.

"Ah, Elbereth, Saida," I hear myself whisper quietly. She has placed a hand on my shoulder. "I do not know if I can do this right now."

"I know," she said. "You have both been through much. And you have both sacrificed a lot for this place."

I do not answer but I look up at her and nod. I feel the back of my throat aching as if burned, and I swallow it down hard, and she pours me another sip of mead, and looks me right in the eyes. Her hair is dark on either side of her face—parted down the middle—and her ears barely break its dark surface—it is thick and deep and I could get lost in it. I am sad. But she speaks:

"You know," she finally says "it really is doubly cruel, his Sea-longing."

I frown, for I do not understand, and she continues.

"Most Silvan elves do not treaty with the Sea—or even think on it—until they are much-aged, but Legolas has had to think on it nearly his whole life."

I have taken a sip of mead as she speaks and swallow quickly and then pause, nearly choking—I do not know how I did not think of this before. "His mother!" I say, suddenly. "And his sisters..."

"Yes," she says quietly, and she stands to clear out ashes from the fireplace, to make room for the evening warmth. "And now that he is compelled to leave, he realizes he is not ready at all, for he has never confronted the betrayal all those centuries ago. He has no where to run to, and no one to rage at but himself, and sometimes—accidentally—at us."

"That does not make his behavior appropriate," I say, and I find myself scowling. Sometimes I tire of being steady for everyone else.

"Oh, I am not saying it does!" Saida turns to me, laughing, and her breath blows a great poof of ashes into the air and it settles like hoary frost on her dark hair. "But it is, particularly, why he gets lost in the sea, I imagine."

I laugh, too, at the way the ash ages her and then admit, murmuring: "I had not thought of that... If he leaves, he must see his mother; if he stays, he must watch his friends grow old and die."

"We must be careful," Saida says, and she is flapping her hand at her hair to remove the ash, and it flies in a whirl around her head, "with this sponsorship of Elboron's. It will be good for you both, I think—he is rudderless without projects—but it is one more child for all of us to love, and one day lose."

I feel my heart hollow out, and my lungs are so flat they feel as if they are not even in my body.

"I know," I say quietly.

"If he needs to go to Minas Tirith early—before the wedding—let him. He has as good as admitted he knows you are right, but he is still slow with the Sea, and he needs time to catch up with himself. He does not want to hurt you."

I sigh, and throw my hands up in the air, too (Legolas and I learned this mannish gesture together, on patrol. One of our captains used to do it at us, in frustration, and it became habit for the us to do at one another as a joke, and morphed slowly into the rest of our lives.)

"How do you know so much, Saida?" I ask, slightly exasperated. "How did you get so wise?"

She laughs again, and wipes her hands off on her shirt so that there are two long lines of grey dust from chest to hips. "Oh, I have known you both as friends for millennia, and then watched you two dance around each other for centuries. I think I would know by now what kind of advice to give."

I smile. She thinks she has just developed this skill of advising us, but she has always been like this, since the first time I tried to blame something on Legolas as children, so I would not take punishment for it from my parents, and since the first time he locked me on my roof in a thunderstorm—she has been mediating since we were Ewessel's age.

And then, at that moment—as if she could read my mind—Ewessel bursts back in through the side door with two cans of tomatoes balled up in her dress—the hem of which she has held between her teeth, so they will not roll out—and a cut of firewood clutched tight to her chest. She looks around the room—taking stock—and then exclaims, "But where is Legolas? We were going to go running!"

"Well, hello to you, too, young one," Saida laughs, and she stands, and unloads Ewessel's goods from her.

She pushes past Saida to me and stands—hands on hips in front of my chair—waiting for an answer. "Legolas was called home," I explain gently. "He is packing for a journey."

"Oh!" she cries, suddenly, and she is on the balls of her feet. "Is he going to the Sea again? Can I go this time, too?"

"No, no," I say, and I take up her hands—she is so small, still not quite even an adolescent. I wonder what she understands of this? "He is not going to the Sea. He is going to see Aragorn and Gimli in Minas Tirith."

"Oh," she says more quietly, and looks around to her aunt. "I was hoping he was going to the Sea. _I_ am almost old enough to see it."

"You will go there one day, Ewessel," I say. "And I am sure Legolas will go with you then. But it is not your time, yet."

"Well, why is it Legolas' time to go? He is always so strange when he comes back," she says, and her thin shoulders rise and fall in frustration, and there is a tension across them that pulls at her collarbones.

"Legolas is an adult, Ewessel," Saida says, cutting in. "He knows what is good for him." She looks at me when she says this, and I roll my eyes at her, as I have already done at Legolas countless times this day. "When you are an adult you can make decisions for yourself, too."

Ewessel does not miss a beat to even breathe: "But sometimes Ithildim makes decisions for Legolas!"

I find myself bursting into laughter, so shocked am I at her observation, but Saida is not shocked.

"And _sometimes_ ," she says, "Legolas makes decisions for Ithildim. That is what people do, when they love each other. Just because you do not see it, does not mean that it is not happening!"

Saida is not wrong.

"Oh," Ewessel says then, suddenly understanding. "Is that why you make decisions for me? And sometimes for Alfirinion, even though it seems he gets to do more things than I? I sometimes just do not know the decisions you are helping to make for him?"

"Yes, young one," Saida says, and she has come over to me and kissed Ewessel on the forehead. "But Ithildim needs to be getting home now."

I take that as a cue and finish my drink.

"He needs to be getting home because Legolas needs him," Ewessel says matter-of-factly, "because he has just gotten back from the Sea."

"You are right," says Saida, and she is pulling me to the feet and then piling Legolas' ceramics and all the food we did not finish into my arms—it is precarious. "And Ithildim needs Legolas, too, and neither of them ought to forget that."

"Oh, would it not be _horrible_ to forget how much you love someone!" Ewessel cries out suddenly, and with much more emotion than I expect of her. I am startled, so startled that I feel the breath in my chest gasp in and then out and make the plates pressed against my sternum quiver with it.

"Oh! Saida!" and then Ewessel is off, and Legolas and I are entirely off her mind. "I saw a dog while I was out! It is Linden's. His dog had puppies with one of Eowyn's, I heard, and there are _five_ , Linden says. They are little but already they chase squirrels!"

Saida raises her eyebrows at me and shoves me gently toward the door. She waves a hand at me as if to shoo me away, and then mouths "Go!"

I leave the house, and as I reach the treeline I can here Ewessel begging Saida for a pup, and explaining all the ways it will be beneficial.

She is very good at wheedling...


	5. Chapter 5

**Author's note:** This chapter will make more sense, and be more meaninful, if you have read "To Rekindle Hearts," but you don't have to have read it to enjoy this. Just know that it involves an accident in young adulthood—which plays heavily in Ithildim and Legolas' friendship and relationship—that results in a head injury with temporary complications, namely absence seizures. Absence seizures cause the individual to appear to stare blankly for several seconds to a minute at a time, and can be the result of head injury, and they may go away with time ("In Rekindle Hearts," they do; please google for more info on absence seizures). Kudos to Cheeky for catching onto this connection in Chapter 2.

* * *

Legolas is half-naked when I arrive at the house. He has obviously washed and combed his hair, for it lays wet and uncharacteristically flat on his back, stuck to the curve of his shoulders. He sits on the bed with his back to the door, and he is darning a pair of socks. As I step into the room, I see another three pairs—two of them mine—balled up and piled beside him.

He always has to do something with his hands when he is nervous. He is one of those people who cannot easily sit still.

He has heard me but does not turn around, and so I cross the room and settle onto the bed behind him. I feel his wet hair pressing into the front of my cotton shirt and soaking through, and it is cold. He leans barely into me, but he does not stop the work of his hands. They whipstitch speedily around the edges of the hole, and then I peer over his shoulder and watch as he turns it inside out and pinches the hole together so they form tiny lips, which he then stitches together, too. He turns it back out and drops the sock on the bed before reaching for the second pair.

I pick them up before he can grab them, pull the needle out of his long fingers, stab it into the balled socks and then toss the lot off the bed. He turns around to me quickly and fully and his weight rocks the bed—he is scowling. He grabs at my wrists but he is slower than usual and so, right now, I am faster. I catch his hands up and twist them so they are pinned loosely in one of my hands against his bare chest. His skin is cold from the water and the weather, and I shake his wrists once before dropping them, and sighing. I pick a shawl up from the head of the bed and tuck it around his shoulders.

He throws himself back onto the bed and wraps the fabric tighter about himself. I lay down beside him and prop myself up on my elbow. His eyes are wide and he looks younger at times like this, when the sea has had him recently.

"Do you remember when you fell, when we were very young? When that man pushed you off the cliff?" I ask him.

He furrows his brow, and frowns at me. "Of course, I remember that, Ithildim. I quite literally allowed myself to fall into a canyon for you. I would hardly forget that..."

He looks mildly offended, and I realize now that was perhaps not the best way to phrase it. But I forge on:

"And you remember how you were." I reach out one hand to unstick his drying hair from his face—it has curled and is catching at his eyelashes at one side, and it is distracting.

"I remember that everyone else was disturbed by how I was, and that I was often lost," he says, and he starts to pull away from my hand but then leans into it. "That I would be there and then suddenly not, but would be none the wiser when I came back, though the world had moved on around me."

"Yes," I say quietly. He is frowning again, but not disapprovingly, just confused. "Legolas," I say, and I start to reach out again, but stop myself, and simply look at him instead.

Elbereth, we fell in love so long ago, but we have just allowed ourselves to realize it—he has just come back to me, and now a thing he cannot control is chasing him away.

"Legolas," I say again, and I swallow. "That is how you are now—here, and then gone. I cannot reach you."

"Oh." His lips hold the "oh" shape for a moment, and he rolls onto his side, and props himself up. "I see," he says. "You are worried, I think," he says.

"I am worried," I affirm.

"Do you remember," he says then, "what I told you it was like, that moment I heard them? The gulls, I mean? Not what it looked like to others, but what happened to me?"

"That you stood still, for they troubled your heart," I answer quietly.

"Yes, and more than that! I forgot all war in Arda, and I could not hear, and could not see, and I swear, Ithildim, I was not there."

"That is why I worry!" I exclaim and I move closer to him and take his face in my hands—I do not know what point he meant to make with this analogy, but it has not made me feel any better. He tugs upward in my hands and it forces both of us to sit up, knee to knee, and I take a breath and continue on. "This is my point, Legolas—you admit you hear nothing when caught in the see, you can do _nothing_! Do you not remember what happened when we were young? When you were ill and would leave me, and you would stand there, a shell? That is how you are. And yet you journey abroad alone!" I am almost shouting now, and he is staring as he does, when people shout, but I cannot stop myself, and I go on: "I cannot _protect_ you like this, Legolas!"

He says nothing for several long seconds, and only relaxes into my hands, and runs a finger over an eyebrow before leaning toward me. He presses his forehead against mine.

"Oh, Ithildim," he says, and he is very quiet now; so quiet after my yelling that my ears strain to hear. "I do not ask you to protect me. We are no longer at war; however tired Middle-earth is of entertaining elves, we are _still_ not at war, and we travel in peace-time.

"I go to Gimli because he is steady—he is the hum of the earth beneath me and the deep stone like a column that runs the length of our souls. I go to him for he is iron-ore, an anchor—not because you are not enough, Ithildim, but because you are _too_ much what I need. You give, and Gimli does not. If I stay, Ithildim, I will go to the sea again."

He puts his hands over mind and clasps his fingers between mine, so they dig into his own cheeks. His breath is on my lips—

"I do not want to go to there again. Not alone. I am not ready."

I nod against him, and he kisses me, softly.

"I am here tonight, ithildim. I have not been away since late last night," he says. "If you want me..."

He puts his hand on the small of my back and shrugs out of the blanket, and I laugh to see the way he raises his eyebrows when I finally look up at him.

I do want him, and he wants me, and I have a feeling I will not see him for a while after this, at least until summer.

He pushes me back onto the pillows, and I roll him over—I straddle him as I use to do at play, off-duty, in the woods, and he is laughing, laughing, laughing.

I press into him, and we rise together.

* * *

The next morning, I help Legolas pack his horse, and just after dawn Alfirinion and Ewessel come by with meat from Saida. We hug him goodbye, and I kiss him gently, and Alfirinion points him toward Gondor, not that he needs the help.

As a swallow swoops overhead, and the wind picks up, and Legolas lifts his voice to the wind and waves jauntily behind, I have that feeling again—that feeling that I will not see him for a very, very long time.

I wave back, and I turn away.

Apparently, Saida gave in and Ewessel got the dog from Linden. When Legolas is entirely out of sight, she takes off toward our house with it biting at her heels. Alfirinion follows her enthusiastically, but I lag behind.

I am not ready to start the chase again.

I dearly hope he comes back.


	6. Chapter 6

**Author's note:** I have spent hours today writing and editing and begrudgingly rewriting (after losing 3 pages of a document!), while drinking really bad coffee and then boxed wine... Instead of working on pressing "Real Life" matters, of course! We grow, we age, we learn, and yet we make the same mistakes over and over again... Oh, procrastination, my favorite maladaptive coping skill —my old friend. Ah well. Enjoy!

* * *

 **CHAPTER SIX**

* * *

 **Ithilien, Early Autumn of Fourth Age 30**

Summer is gone, Elboron has been married, and autumn is here. Legolas has not come back. He did not even make it to Minas Tirith, and no one has seen him.

It has been harrowing. At first I was silent and organized searches tirelessly, because leading is what I do, and it distracts me. Still, I did not often rest, and, when I did, I could not rest in our bed, for this is worse than all those other times he has disappeared... He declined to send a message this time (or perhaps he could not), and no one has seen him, in Minas Tirith or elsewhere.

What is worst, though, is the way we discovered he had not gone to Minas Tirith at all.

Faramir sent word to us (and to Aragorn) by the fastest rider he had when Legolas' horse arrived—without him—at Emen Arnyn. So much has happened since Legolas disappeared that the timing of it all confuses me, but I have kept notes, and so I know this was three days after he left our settlement. The messenger said said the horse was unharmed, but one of Legolas' bags was still strapped to it, and it was nervous.

Faramir arrived with the horse and a group of his rangers later that same day, and we set out together. The horse led us to Southern Ithilien—not toward Minas Tirith, as we expected. It stopped at a creek, and there I felt my heart drop.

The creek was a tributary that flowed through Lebennin and into Belfalas, southward to the Sea, and ever Westward.

Alfirinion and Elboron were with us, and—as the horse splashed into the water—Alfirinion looked up at me with an utterly hopeless expression. He knew, and I knew. But I said nothing to him—I could not. I only squeezed his shoulder, and we moved on.

We did not find Legolas that night, and we have not found him—nor any sign of him—since.

After a fortnight of coordination and of searching, his absence broke me. The _not-knowing_ of it. The fact that the only thing I _did_ know was that Legolas had undoubtedly been pulled westward by currents I have tried tirelessly to understand, and that I do not know how to track him, because I am still of the Wood and I cannot think like the Sea, as hard as I try. I might have lost my mind, then, to rumination, had Saida not intervened and moved me in with her.

I could not live in our home alone—I cannot—with such unsurety... Usually, Legolas swings back like a pendulum, and I can time it, and though it might exasperate me, I can at least predict his departure and his returns—like the tides of the Sea and the seasons of the Wood, if you know him he is readable. But I cannot stay in the place that we built together not knowing if he will ever walk through those doors again, and, if he does, knowing that it will most likely not be of his own volition...

He has been gone for too long for the Valar to have graced him with such freedom. I do not subscribe, necessarily, to an undying belief in their powers, but I do know that it seems they forsook woodelves a long time ago, and though Legolas is the son of _one_ Sindar, I imagine he is no less Woodelf to any of the Valar than he is to me, or any of our folk...

But perhaps I am too cynical. Perhaps I have lost hope.

Legolas' older brother Lumornon arrived a month ago, and he began his own searches, with my permission. Gimli came here before Elboron's wedding last month—about the same time Lumornon arrived—and then stayed after, and I do not know that he will leave again for a long time, until Legolas is back, or maybe even longer. He and Legolas are closer in some ways than Legolas and I will ever be, for a mortal's passion burns swiftly and powerfully and the two of them are bound with an intensity the likes of which I do not pretend to understand.

And, so, Gimli is candidly heartbroken.

I am heartbroken, too.

I went to Elboron's wedding without Legolas, of course; I met Elboron's pregnant wife who is kind and lovely and carrying the child Legolas and I are expected to aid in rearing, and I did not know what to say when I met her. I stood in silence, jaw nearly flapping, and Elboron grasped my shoulder consolingly—he is so sensitive to emotion, like his father—while Alfirinion jumped in to introduce me, to save me the embarrassment of my silence, and my grief...

I _needed_ Legolas then; I have needed him so many times since he left in the spring, for so many reasons.

I have looked, and I have looked.

I am terrified and I am exhausted.

I do not know where Legolas is—it has been _months_ and no one knows...

It burns my heart.


	7. An Interlude

**AN INTERLUDE**

* * *

 **A cove in the southwest of Belfalas Bay, a few weeks later**

When we find him he is thin, and berry-brown. He has always been darker than me—he has his mother's complexion—but he is browner and bronzed from the sun; his hair has streaks of blond in places where his hair was already the lightest, and the scar on his cheek is pearly in comparison to his tan. And, Elbereth, he is so thin. . .

Gimli and I did not expect to find anything here. We brought two elves with us, just in case, as Gimli has never quite given up hope. But still, we did not expect him to go to the sea and then stay there. I more expected to find his body washed up in the bay than his live-self hidden away in this cove. We have been combing the bay every other week for months—the elves that could stand it, and Faramir's men—and we found nothing. Every time, we found nothing. Part of me was relieved, but part of me was not. I almost would have rather known where he was, even if it meant he was dead.

These past few months, I have thought things I never thought possible, and I have thought some very dark things before, in all our long years in Mirkwood.

But wishing my lover were dead, so that I could rest more easily?

That is the darkest one yet.


	8. Chapter 7

**Author's note:** I want to seriously thank Cheekybeak for her beta work on this story, and for her medical knowledge. She has been invaluable in brainstorming and compassionate in pointing out the weaknesses in Legolas and Ithildim's relationship and my arc for it, which I do not always naturally see. The way characterization can create—and affect—plot is endlessly fascinating to me. I highly recommend Cheekybeak's writing for a look at raw relationships with well-developed characters and driving plots. Relationships are not something that come naturally to me (in fiction or real life—god bless my partner's patience!), yet I am drawn to write them, nevertheless!

The necklace referenced is a plot point in _Enough_ , that has not been fleshed out yet, as the story is still a WIP...

 **Nerd note:** For those interested, I calculated the distance from Legolas' starting point in Ithilien to the southwestern most point of Belfalas (just to the west of Tolfalas, on the mainland) by looking at an overlay of a Middle-earth map with Europe, and then approximating that distance as the width of the country of Italy from northeast to southwest (which is about the size of the US state of Arizona), or about 237 miles. I have given Legolas a bit of a break here by approximating the distance at about 180 miles, instead, or roughly 60 leagues. (War horses could cover about 40 to 60 miles a day, so it is a hard 3 day's ride from Ithilien to Belfalas.) All in all, Legolas has been gone for a very long time (about four months), and woodelves can be wily, so I gave him quite a distance to wander.

* * *

 **CHAPTER SEVEN**

* * *

 **Inland on the peninsula of Belfalas, Fall of Fourth Age 30**

Legolas sits cross-legged on his cot in the pavilion we have set up near his own camp, but farther inland. He holds his wrist to his chest, and I wonder if it will have to be entirely rebroken and set again, because it is clearly broken. He must have been in terrible pain these recent weeks, but he was perhaps too caught up in the sea to know.

I can see it in his face as he stares past my shoulder to the wall behind me. His eyes have that look he gets sometimes when a bird's shadow shoots across the ground beside us, or we have ridden too close to the sea, or when thunderstorms roll in from the bay to break upon us at the mountains in summer. I think of it like the surface of a puddle beginning to freeze—each moment that passes, he struggles for the surface; each animal that steps in it stirs it, each degree either frees it or traps it, and Legolas is alternately anchored and drowning. It is horrifyingly confusing to watch and, I imagine, to experience.

But I know he is back now, because he has begun to move. He is chewing the inside of his lip—his lips are pursed to the side, and I can hear his teeth click together as he worries at his cheek. Eventually, he seems to bite too hard, and he startles himself, and his gaze snaps suddenly to me. His eyes are clear, and he blinks and his eyes widen as if they are dry—he clears his throat, but he does not speak.

I am standing several feet away from him, with my arms crossed and pressed against my chest, and, though he stares at me, I cannot move. I have done the initial fawning and crying and pulling him into my arms and now that all that adrenaline is gone, I know it is on to the tending.

But I am so very angry.

And while Legolas is mercurial, he is not a fool. And as much as I resent him some days for it, he knows me, and he is here enough to see past my silence, though I try my best to use my most passive face, as I remind myself that I have much to learn still from him, even though I am angry. After all, I have no idea what has happened since he left, all those moons ago. Perhaps there is more to it than I know—with Legolas, there usually is.

He is assessing me silently, and then his nostrils flare as they do sometimes when he is experiencing some intense emotion, and he glances down, and then back up, and he catches me up in his eyes as he speaks. "Ithildim..."

I do not answer him yet, because I do not know what to say, and I know whatever happens next will be important. He leans forward slightly over his injured arm but keeps his gaze steadily on me, and while there are a hundred thousand words I might choose, not a single one comes out.

Finally, I hold a hand out toward him as I turn away. "Stay," I say, and I call out of the tent for hot water and a healer's kit.

I learned enough from my father and on patrol to know the basics of what Legolas needs, and after Tinu very quickly but systematically fussed over him and ascertained that he was not in immediate danger of dying, Gimli and our two companions left the tent in a rush and left us here, in silence. I have found that unspoken commands being absolutely followed is one of the positives of co-leading Ithilien...

But I would almost rather not be alone with him right now.

Gimli sticks his head in and lifts a hand toward Legolas in acknowledgement as he hands over a small steaming pot, and I take the kit he has pinned in his armpit, and he ducks back out again.

I busy myself on the ground near the tent's entrance, mixing willow bark and marshmallow and a very mild sedative, but I can feel Legolas staring at me as I work, and when I glance up he is focused on my hands as they crush. I thought—knowing as he does the anger barely contained beneath the surface—that he would have been desperate for Gimli to stay here with us, but he is not.

He is focused _entirely_ on me, and the quick motions of my hands, and though his uninjured hand tightens around his wrist and massages it and he scrunches his face, he does not look away as I reach into the kit and shake lint off the tea strainer. In fact, his brows furrow as if concentrating, and he suddenly says:

"I missed your hands, Ithildim."

I look up at him, but I do not answer, and then I go back to my work, standing up to find the small pile of his things we recovered at his campsite, for there is a tin cup, somewhere.

I find it beneath a nearly illegible, crumpled map, and there is a ball of yarn stuffed into it.

He has always travelled with the strangest things.

My anger fades slightly for this is so endearing. My skin feels less cold as I put the strainer on the cup and pour the tea into it. But my hands are shaking, and some of the bark and leaves miss the cup and burn at my fingers.

"I missed your voice and your patience and how you braid my hair back at night—" his voice has caught in his throat, and it is suddenly very hoarse, and he stops talking, and he looks down.

His hair is wild about his face, and there is a section of it whose strands are knotted and matted, I can tell, at his hairline.

He has clearly not tended it in weeks. Legolas has the kind of hair you cannot neglect, for it has a mind of its own. I know he has been away from himself for weeks. The evidence is so clearly before me that it is hard to remain angry.

But it burns me—it burns me so badly—for I have been so worried.

And so I have taken the cup in my hands, wrapped it up in a kerchief, and crossed to his cot before I can stop myself. I place his injured hand in his lap and raise the other to the mug. I am helping him lift it to his lips, but the moment my hand touches his, he starts to cry, and he cannot take the tea, and it hurts so much to watch, for Legolas does not cry, not in front of people, hardly even me.

Oh, he looks dreadful.

I kiss his forehead and pat his cheek and tell him not to cry, for there will be time for that later, and I need him to be himself—strong, present, and trying his very best, because I must know he is all right before I lose him to the sea again.

He is choking on his breaths as he nods, and he coughs, and he is drifting, so I tap his cheek harder than a pat, and he starts, and begins to drink.

I hold the cup to his lips until it is gone, and then I leave him sitting there on the cot for a moment, hands folded in his lap and staring at the ground. I lean out of the tent and tell the healer what I have given him.

I do not want to keep track of it; I do not think I can.

I sit down on the cot beside him and he turns to face me, knees knocking against each other as he twists his hips. He grimaces, and I reach out and straighten his legs, and take up his hands to undo the clasps at his wrists.

He is biting the inside of his cheek again. I undo the clasps at his chest, too, and help him to lift the shirt over his head, and to pull his arms out of it; we work his injured arm out carefully, and I pull off his the tunic completely. He is not wearing an undershirt.

His chest is paler than his arms and face, but still brown, and though he is hunched over like he hurts, there are not many marks still visible on his body. He is not looking at me, and his hair falls around his face so I cannot see him—he is embarrassed. There is much he has to say to me, I can tell, and the stories told by his injuries and his body and his tears are only the start of it...

I have my sleeves tied up around my upper arms, and I undo one of the straps of leather so it falls down, and then I loop Legolas' hair up in a loose knot at the nape of his neck, so it no longer hides his face.

I look at his body again and notice his necklace missing—he has worn that necklace every day since his sister died, years and years ago, and it is not there.

He is _still_ not looking at me, so I put a hand under his chin, and tilt his face toward mine, so we are eye to eye, and very close.

"Legolas, where is your pendant?" I ask him.

He looks at me, and he shivers, and I realize the fall weather is cold to him, and I remember that elves are not infallible—I have not been reminded of this in so long, relatively; we have not been at war for _so long_ —and I am scared again. We are delicate.

Legolas, too, is delicate, and I thought I had lost him. How did this happen?

But my thoughts are cut by his voice—it is quiet and choked by his sigh. "They took it," he says.

I have been looking at the swell around his forearm, but at this I stare back up at his face, and he is staring at his arm, too, but then glancing up at me, and then away, at the tent wall.

"Who took it?" I ask quickly.

"Some men," he says distractedly. "I was gone away—I was so far, Ithildim!—and they wanted my things, and I said no, but I could not stop them."

He is quiet.

And then: "I could not stop it. I saw it happen, and I was there, but I was not... Do you understand what I mean?"

He falls utterly silent now, besides his breathing, and I do know what he means—he was there, but he could do nothing to stop them because his body was three steps behind his mind, and his mind was three steps behind the world, caught up as he was in some current or another.

I try to tilt his head to me again, but he will not look, and he stares resolutely downward—I can feel the muscles in his neck strain against looking at me.

"What did they do to you?" I demand, but he just shakes his head. "Legolas!" I say, and I have grabbed his wrists, and he winces and bites back a grunt, and I somehow forgot his arm, and I have hurt him, and oh, I am sorry.

I am telling him I am sorry for hurting him, and he has leaned into me, and I have taken him up under his arm to get an answer, but still he is not talking.

"What did they do?" I ask him again, for I can think of a thousand things men might want to do to an elf, and none of them make me any less anxious.

This time he murmurs an answer, but he is so so quiet I can barely hear him. "They just took my _things_ , Ithildim." He sighs. "My pendant and my crystals, and the money you packed for me."

"Oh, Legolas," I breathe. "Oh, I am sorry."

I always make him pack money when he travels. He does not like to use it, and he is better suited to bartering, but the men of Gondor these days—they prefer coins.

"It is all right," he says, and he has leaned into me, and breathed out slowly, and as he relaxes I feel his shoulders untense and his whole self shudders as he lets himself go; tucked as he is under my arm, I loosen my grip on his bicep and pull him close instead.

"Did they hurt you?" I finally ask him.

"Yes," he answers simply, and immediately, and he sounds far away. "You know I do not like when people take my things."

I almost laugh, and I feel him chuckle under my arm but then stop suddenly, as if he is hurting.

"When did this happen, Legolas?"

He does not answer, and he is so relaxed against my side I think for a moment that he has fallen asleep. So I sit up straight and turn him toward me, and look him straight in the face.

"When?"

"Oh," he says distractedly, and he tries to shift his hips straight again; I frown at him. "I do not know."

"Elbereth, Legolas!" I reprimand. "Was this the last time you were hurt or have you been hurt since then?"

He shakes his head and looks around the room, eyes darting from the tent entrance to his small pile of things and back to me, as if he has only just really realized where he is and what is going on.

"That was the last time I was hurt, Ithildim. I do not know _when_ ," he says. "I do not know."

I breathe deeply and remind myself how the addled mind works, and the tired mind, and the mind with trauma, and the mind of children when they are lost—"Tell me what you saw when it was happening," I say instead.

He frowns again, and forcibly straightens his hips. "I was listening to the surf and I felt the sand on the bottoms of my feet. And the way those tiny shelled creatures—who when they are dead spread themselves out like butterflies' wings—the way they suck at your toes. Have you felt it?" he asks distractedly.

I have not, but I tell him I have just to keep him talking.

"I remember those things," he continues. "And then a man was there, and he was talking to me, but I could not understand him. It was like when I am away for too long and I forget how Westron works. Do you know? How Gimli helps me?"

I nod. I know. Gimli recalibrates him every time.

"And then one was in my face, and then hurting me, and he took my things. And after that, what I saw—I watched the moon set into the morning."

He is far away again, and I take his hands in mine and shake his unhurt one once, and pinch at the fleshy part of his palm until he comes back to me.

"Tell me about the moon, Legolas," I say.

"It was the red moon, Ithildim," he says, and he suddenly looks at me, and so I turn him back to me, so we are once again facing one another wholly.

I put my hands on his shoulders to keep him here, looking only at me, and he does not chew his lip now but his hand is fiddling about— he grabs the hem of my tunic and is picking at an uneven knot while I study him.

"Did you have a red moon, Ithildim? Where you were?" he asks suddenly, and with such honest curiosity that I find my throat closing, and I cannot answer him.

Of course, we have had a red moon—he has only been sixty leagues from us this whole time! It breaks my heart to realize he honestly does not know that, and that the red moon was a fortnight ago. He does not know where he is, or how close he has been to home. And he has been so, so lost.

But all I say is: "Yes, Legolas, we had a red moon, too."

"Oh," he says.

"I was looking for you under the red moon. I did not find you..."

He is watching me now, and his eyes are wide— entirely too large in his wan face—and the circles below them look swollen. He shivers again, and I turn him back toward me, but he jerks away so suddenly—for the third time—that I at first become angry again—I have been terrified for so long, and he pulls away from me when I have finally found him?

And then I realize, and I do not even have to ask him, for he feels the question in my touch—as distant as he is. This connection is what made our troop so successful, but it has not always served us well as lovers. But, in this instant, I am grateful for it, for he offers without prompting: "They punched me in the hip and something pulled, Ithildim; and when he grabbed my arm where it had been broken, it popped. I was so distracted by it. I could not do a thing—all I could hear was the surf, and their words were like soft nonsense in between waves. I let them take it all, for I could not stop them."

I let him turn his legs forward again, and then I stand from the cot, and lay him on his back. I have too many questions about these months and those injuries to ask him right now without overwhelming the both of us, so I set to assuring myself he is hale enough. I take a moment to brush errant hair back from his forehead, and then kiss his lips lightly. When I stand up, he smiles at me in the way that he sometimes does—it is the smile he has when he is feeling guilty, or too grateful—and then he starts to stretch out his legs, but I step in to help instead.

I need him to know, however angry I am, that I still care. And if I cannot say that right now with words, I will show him with my actions.

He lets me straighten them out, and I press him more fully into the cot, so just the small of his back is off its surface. I brush hair back from his face again—it is a habit—and start an inspection of him: his chest, and his neck, and his arms. I feel at his glands and press at his ribs, which seem to be bruised, for he gasps once, grits his teeth, and looks away. His arm has been broken for a long time—maybe since the sea first took him—but it has been fixed more than once. I do not know how, and I think that will be someone else's job to find out.

He is thinner than I have seen him—even after spider bites when you shrink away to nothing for a time, when you are so sick—and his hipbones are stark against the waistline of his trousers; I tug at them, and glance at his face, and he nods. I work them down over his hips and his thighs and then pull them over his ankles and off his feet. I leave his socks on, for I know he is cold. There is a blanket folded at the head of the cot, and I pick it up, and lay it over his arms and chest, and go back to inspecting his hip.

It has been a fortnight, but it still looks painful—it is a brownish-yellow color all over the skin, and it must have been such an angry purple when it happened. I wonder if it had been worse than that, too, and, if it was, how he walked on it for all that time.

But instead of asking I only breathe, "Oh, that could not have felt good to fix."

"It did not," he sighs, and he sounds so grounded when he says that that I find myself peering up at him, and squinting at his face to see how real his presentness is. "Tinu can check it," he continues. "I do not want you to have to do it—it pains me, and you will know it, and I would not ask that of you, after what I have already put you through."

I do not say anything because I do not know what to say. I swallow and look down and go back to my work: running my hands down his thighs, massaging his knees to feel for swelling, feeling at his calves and kneading at his tendons. I eventually take his ankles in my hands and turn them gently; I take each foot in both hands and press along the top, on the arch, and then out along his toes.

He does not react to any of it, except to breathe more deeply, and so I decide that his hip and his arm are the only parts of him that really hurt—apart from the sundry cuts and bruises—at least now. Tinu can check the back of him—I am reassured enough.

When I am done, I pull the blanket over him, and move back up the cot to sit at his head.

He is gone, and I have not noticed.

But it is not the sea-longing—he sleeps.

I place a hand on his chest, and feel the rise and fall of it, and I match it to my own. He has partially come back, though I have found him. If we had not wandered along the coast on a whim, he would still be gone, and alone here and, probably—in a few months—dead.

We sit that way for a long time—me, ruminating and stewing in my miserable hypotheticals and he, hurt and exhausted and asleep.

It is never, _ever_ easy with him.

Finally, I put my hand under the blanket, and I let my hand sink into his chest. Beneath the blanket, he is warm, and though his sternum is hard under my hand, it is like the heat of him rises around me, and cradles it, and I remember all the things I love about him, and all the things I missed.

 _Ithildim, I missed your hands,_ he had said—the first thing he said to me besides my name in all our months apart. And though it sounds trifling, I know it is Legolas' way of saying much more. And _I_ missed his hands, too, for in his hands and the things he will do with them—bake, write, garden, _love me_ —he speaks with them far more than he does with his words.

But I know this thing that has happened—his absence—whatever happened in all those months that he was gone... This thing will require us to learn to speak, or we will not come out of it at all, at least not in love.

He moves in his sleep and his fingers seek out my wrist and wrap around it, and hold it tightly; his callouses scratch at my skin—Oh, I missed his hands.

I find myself dropping my head to my chest, and silently crying.

I hear someone at the door, and then they have stepped inside, and I do not have to turn around to know it is Tinu. She can wait.

"Leave us," I say without looking—I do not want her to see this. We are, both of us, so vulnerable right now.

I hear her tidy up the healer's kit, and then she says as she leaves the pavilion: "Linden has sent a bird to Faramir, and I expect Faramir is riding for Ithilien. They will be here in two days. We can take him home."

I do not answer with words, but I nod, and I know she sees it.

She leaves, but after a moment, there is the swish of the curtains and her voice is back inside again. "I have left a vial inside the door. Give it to him, one way or another. Then I will come and fix him up, and you can go elsewhere, and rest."

I clear my throat and nod my head, and find myself saying—very roughly—"Thank you, Tinu."

And she does not say anything, but I hear the flap close behind her, and I pull off my own tunic, and shrug under the blanket beside him, and I wrap my arms around him. He turns his his head into my chest—it rests under my chin. I am barely breathing, but he sleeps.

I stare at the tent wall, and wonder how we got exactly here.

* * *

 _This is the last of my 3 chapter update—thanks for reading! More to come. Please consider leaving a review on the way out!_


	9. Chapter 8

**Author's note:** I met a kid at work last week who _loves_ Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, but had not read much of Tolkien's larger legendarium. He reminded me so much of _me_ when I was his age that I couldn't help finding a "donated" copy of _The Book of Lost Tales: Book One_ "in our donation box" and sending it with him to his new foster home. Oops. Pass it on...!

Also, two stories are referenced in passing in this chapter (but you don't need to read them to understand), "Idiot Swallows & Impatient Dwarves" and "Humble Gifts." No beta for this chapter-I apologize if it is substandard.

* * *

 **CHAPTER EIGHT**

* * *

Tinu has reset Legolas' arm and checked the rest of him, and though she says he is fine—and I believe her—there is more that she is not saying.

"His arm should not have healed correctly," she says. "If he injured it when he says he did."

"Well, perhaps we are lucky then. Legolas has luck about him," I say, and I cross my arms and watch as she cleans up her things—dirty rags from wiping dirt away from cuts, dirty scalpels from peeling back scabs that had festered, dirty bandages, bloodied from dabbing away at too-slowly healing injuries.

So much dirt has come off him, for one wandering every day by the shore.

"I do not think it is just luck," Tinu says, and she is frowning as she shoves all the rags into a sack and then pours water on her hands and begins to scrub.

She does not look at me, and so I do not look at her. I cross to Legolas' cot and sit on the edge of it; Tinu has tucked sheets in around him tightly, and still he sleeps.

"I do not know that Legolas' sense of time is to be trusted right now, either," I offer. "Maybe it happened more recently than he thinks."

"Perhaps," Tinu says, and now she is drying her hands on a clean rag, and lining up the medicines with too much attention on the ground beside his cot.

I watch her from above—her dark head bobs as she counts the vials, and then stands up; she brushes her hands on her thighs and runs a hand along her hairline when she finally looks at me.

"Ask him when he wakes, who helped him, with his arm," she says shortly, "and his hip."

I stare at her, and I am running every possibility through my mind as I consider what she means by these words. She thinks someone has helped Legolas recently? Someone skilled enough to have set a bone with consideration to elvish healing?

He has spoken to me only of seeing men as he wandered.

"Surely he would have said, had he seen an elf," I end up saying aloud.

"Perhaps," says Tinu. "Find out from him. Use the belladonna if you must—you know how it makes him talk, and it is a sedative anyway, and he will need a dose soon. I would prefer him calm as we transition him away from this place. Belladonna is not my plant of choice for Legolas usually, but in this case..."

"Aye," I acknowledge. "I will try my best to get it out of him naturally, when he wakes."

"Good," says Tinu. She takes a final survey of the room, nods as if satisfied with the order she

imposed on it, and she leaves the tent.

We are again alone, and I—again—do not know what to do.

I stare at the line of vials lined up at the base of his cot—the belladonna is third in, and it would be easy to know what truly happened, who he met, were we to use it. He is so unfortunately influenced by the plant...

Gimli comes into the room then and settles into the ground on his cloak, spread all about him. He blocks my view of the vials, and I focus on Legolas once again.

I readjust my buttocks on the bed and Legolas responds—he has rolled onto his side so that his thigh and abdomen rest against my back and hips—it is like watching a cat readjust around its playmate.

Still he sleeps but this, at least, means he is regaining some knowledge of his own body, and a desire for nearness.

"Gimli," I say, and I do not look up, but instead trace the curve of Legolas' thigh, to his knee, and I stop with my hand rested on his calf, the now-disturbed sheet separating us. I am leaned toward Legolas and my head is turned downward and away from Gimli, and I cannot find the words.

I know what I want to ask him. I want to ask him if he will heal Legolas, and take care of him for me, as he does every time Legolas goes to the sea or takes to the woods. When he comes back speechless and drifting, Gimli brings him back and, within a day, Legolas is nearly himself again. It is dwarvish magic, I think, or perhaps Gimli is just made of something stronger than I am.

I let go of Legolas' calf and turn back to Gimli and open my mouth to speak—I look at him and his dark eyes are watching me with an intense attention that reminds me of Legolas; his cheeks are ruddy above his beard. It is raining, and he is wet.

Gimli shakes his head at me, and lifts a thick finger to my lips.

"Hush," he says. "You are angry right now, and you are allowed to be. I am angry, but I have only known him for a few decades, and he is not my husband, so I have already forgiven him. You do not have to forgive him yet."

I have always liked Gimli, from the moment I met him off a path in the Mirkwood forest, exhausted after a night of fighting spider venom, and watching his dearest friend die and come back to life, and then being overrun by strange woodelves. Still, he was gracious and protective and kind, and he reaches Legolas in ways I cannot.

And though I do not want to be angry, I am. But one thing Gimli said in particular catches my attention. "Gimli..." I start, not quite sure how to say it. "Gimli, you know Legolas and I are not married."

He shrugs, and stretches out his legs, starting to observe the line of medicine extended from behind him to just past his right hand. "I know that," he says.

"So, Legolas is not my husband," I say, and my hand has slid back up to grasp the back of Legolas' knee as I speak.

"Maybe he is not," Gimli says, and he is tapping one of the vials nearest his thigh now. "But it seems to me he is as good as."

I do not argue, for he is right. And were Legolas less...capricious I would have asked him years ago to be my husband. But wedding in Mirkwood when you are in the army is not a smart thing, and marrying a windstorm who will skirt motional intimacy as surely as a windstorm skirts the valley is perhaps a fruitless endeavor, besides. Calm and storm, calm and storm—it can be exhausting.

But maybe later we will be ready for it.

Gimli interrupts my pondering and I remember where I am with a sudden sharpness, like I have slammed back into myself after a short drop from an unexpected step.

"Do not use the belladonna on him," Gimli says suddenly, lifting up the vial with which he has been fiddling.

I look up sharply and pull my hand back from Legolas' leg into my lap. He rolls back onto his back and lifts his splinted arm to his chest, cradling it with his other hand.

I feel my eyes burn and I look away quickly, and back to Gimli. "Tinu and I spoke the woodland tongue. How—"

"When you are dear friends with an elf who loses his Westron every time he is lost at Sea, one learns new dialects quickly enough, and I have had thirty years of losing him to learn."

I sigh. "I have had far more than thirty years of losing him, and I have not yet learned enough."

"And yet you are still here," Gimli says, and he frowns, and hands me the belladonna.

"I love him." I say simply, and I shrug, and take the vial.

"I know," Gimli says, and he stands and brushes off the front of his pants and the seat of his long tunic, folding his cloak over his arm. "Your elf—he is a special one, but he does not trust, and he does not like losing control. So do not destroy what little control he has regained by taking it away with a drug, Ithildim—do not give him a reason to run again."

"I did not give him a reason to run in the first place!" I say hotly, offended, and I tuck the vial into my pocket, but Gimli is not having it.

He crosses his arms and stares at me. "I am not saying you _did_ , Ithildim. Listen to my words, you fool Elf! I sometimes do not know how Legolas tolerates you." I blink. "I am only _advising_ you, Ithildim, to not give him some reason—imagined or not!—to distrust you. You _need_ to heal. He needs to heal. And then, my friend, you can work this out."

He gestures toward us and waves his hand about, as if trying to encapsulate what exactly it is he thinks Legolas and I are.

He steps toward us and leans down to tuck hair behind Legolas' ear, who blinks but does not wake. "He owes you an explanation, I imagine," Gimli says. "I will try to help him to sort through it. I am not sure he is entirely capable of making sense of it on his own at this point."

I nod, and I smile at him, and he reaches out to grasp my hand and thump my shoulder—I find myself laughing.

"No belladonna," I say with a smile.

He grasps my hand harder and nods. "No belladonna," he affirms, as if praising me. "Go, be angry for a while. Get the worst of it out so when he wakes and you come back to see him, you can think clearly enough to say the words both of you need to hear."

I laugh again and Gimli lets go of my hand. Legolas rolls onto his side in lieu of waking, his injured arm tucked up under his chin as if he is a small child, instead of a warrior and forester who has spent the better part of his years chasing creatures of darkness away from his home...

"Sometimes you speak in worse riddles than he!" I chide.

He grunts and steps away from the cot again. "When you have spent as much time as I have in the company of Legolas and Aragorn—great students of Gandalf's equanimously-delivered enigmas—one learns to play along with them, or to simply cease with conversing, and I do not intend to do that."

He has walked away as he speaks and stops at the tent door.

"Shoo, Ithildim," he says. He holds the pavilion's flap back for me—apparently he does not intend to leave, after all. "Walk, and ground yourself. You are positively buzzing with something and it is making me nervous. You are worse than him!" He nods toward Legolas and I smile again, because I know what he means—Legolas can buzz with energy, like his whole self is vibrating with his love of being alive. (Or he did, before the sea, and sometimes still does, in between it.)

I lean over and press a kiss to Legolas' forehead, and this time he does wake. I do not speak as he lifts his injured arm to brush the length of my face, from temple to cheekbone to press his fingertips finally against my lips. He has not lifted his head and he watches me sleepily as his fingers run over my chapped skin and then stop to cradle my cheek.

"Shh," I tell him. "I am going for a walk. Rest."

He swallows hard and narrows his eyes as if he struggles to focus on my face, and then he says, in a very quiet voice. "I do not think I tried hard enough to come back to you."

I feel the anger flash in me because I have much more to say to him before he comes to this conclusion, and it feels like he has taken something away from me. But I chase away the anger because he is frowning and trying to stay focused; he grips my cheek more tightly, in an attempt to keep himself grounded. I hear Gimli intentionally fiddle with the privacy knocker at the tent door—he does not want us to have this conversation yet, and, to tell the truth, neither do I.

"We will speak on that later," I tell Legolas, and I take his hand from my cheek and I kiss it, carefully folding his fingers into the palm of his hand and tucking his arm back under his chin. "Now is not the time."

He nods, and I tuck loose strands of hair down the collar of his shirt so they do not bother him while he sleeps.

"All right," he says, "but you do not need to be so kind; I have hurt you." And then—just like that—he is gone.

When I look up, Gimli stands with the flap held now fully open, and his eyebrows raised, and one arm lifted slightly from his side, somewhat dramatically.

"Oh, I am coming!" I hiss in an amused whisper, and then I am out and into the rainy mist that smells so strongly of the sea. I hear Gimli let the flap fall shut behind me, and I am passing Tinu and Linden and making straight for the place we found Legolas, to explore it more before the sand whips it all away, to understand where he has been.

Gimli wants me to rest and relax and regain myself, but I cannot do that right now—I have too many questions, and I cannot stop thinking on Legolas' experience for all these months, alone in a land without trees.

Or somewhat alone, except for antagonistic humans, according to Legolas, and an elf or elf-like person, according to Tinu. Both those things are wildly disconcerting.

I break into a run and am soaked by the mist—in sprinting, I bring the rain down harder upon myself, and it is as if the whole sky is the sea, and it weeps.

I come to a stop at the top of a dune and look down at the scene below:

The sea is angry, and there is a great storm building farther out—I cannot see it, but the sea's white caps tell me so.

I start to slip and slide down the hill and, when I get to the bottom, I stop, and I think, and I only search a little bit. I settle as close as I can to the angry surf without it attempting to drag me in. The sand stings me as the wind whips, and the mist seems to rise around me instead of fall, caught up as it is in the storm.

I turn my head to look up the coast, toward where I know the mouths of the Anduin and Lebinnin and eventually Ithilien hide—far away and behind endless clouds—and then I look back toward the West—down its coast—and I imagine around the peninsula, where Legolas might have eventually found Dol Amroth and Edhellond, one haven full of elf-like men and the other filled with elven memory...

And then I look back out to sea again and I am absolutely shocked, for there is someone standing there, far out! Out amid the crashing waves on what appears to be a very shallow sandbar!

I jump up, and I shout at them. I squint my eyes in the driving wind and raise a hand to protect my brow for when I am ready to look again. A wait a moment and flick the rain from my eyelids, and try again.

And, when I do, the person is gone.

I stand for a moment, mouth agape and wishing for a witness.

I drop back to the ground and put my head in my hands and wonder briefly if I am going mad. I am sure of what I saw, but it certainly _feels_ unbelievable. But what of these past four months has felt anything _but_ ?

I try to forget the person and focus on the more pressing issue at hand: Legolas.

When I finally return to camp, I am unhappy, and I am cold as ice.

I am entirely consumed with how I am going to tell Legolas I do not want to take him home.

Not even Gimli's well-protected fire warms me.

* * *

 _The sequel to this story is "Strange Comforts." Please consider reviewing, and I hope you enjoy the series_!


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